Moroccan Travellers in Europe in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century: The Representation of Western Modernity.

Belhiah Khadija, Ibn Zohr University, FLHS, Agadir

This paper investigates the representation of the West by early Moroccan travellers and how well these Moroccan travellers fared in such a representation; that is, how objective they are by comparison with most Western travellers in their representation of Morocco. In other words, the purpose is to determine whether or not the Moroccan scholars sent to Europe on official missions represented Western alterity faithfully. As we well know, the Western representation of Morocco, and the Orient in general, is rooted in a deep-seated Eurocentrism and a long-standing Orientalist tradition that created its own Orient, framed its own understanding of alterity, and, ultimately, misrepresented Oriental reality. Did Moroccan scholars fall in the same pitfalls of representation by registering, just like most of their Western counterparts, a biased perception of difference? This is the main question that my paper explores.

The paper will focus on texts written by some Moroccan travellers who were mainly ambassadors to Europe in the second half of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century. The narratives written in Arabic document these early travellers’ encounter with and discovery of modernity. Although such early travelogues have existed in the form of manuscripts in the Moroccan archives for a considerably long time, they have not been revised and reprinted until recently, thanks to some determined Moroccan researchers. Due to such a long-standing lack of awareness of these documents, which have spanned a few centuries though, they did not, for a long time, occupy the position they deserved as contributions to the genre of travel literature. Consequently, they have been rarely cited in studies about Arab representations of the West, especially in English studies, and are, therefore, rarely compared to Western texts. Thus, my paper is inscribed in this relatively recent scholarly effort to bring to the fore the Moroccan contribution to the genre of Arab travel narratives which indeed shed light on the East/West encounter and translate the Moroccan travellers’ impressions on the West in general and on Western modernity in particular.

She teaches English at Ibn Zohr University. She has a DESA and a Doctorate in English in the area of Postcolonial Studies. The title of her DESA thesis was: The Representation of Otherness in Edith Wharton’s In Morocco, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Her Ph.D. dissertation was titled: The Problematic of Representation of Otherness and the Paradoxes of Modernity. She has published a few articles in her area of expertise. She is also a member of the association: Les Femmes Chercheurs au Sud.

That globalization has caused great changes in the texture of cultures, discourses, and cultural practices is not open to doubt. Besides, cultural encounters, shocks, and clashes have increased, and so have their accompanying discourses and narratives. The need for multi-perspective and multicultural approaches has become imperative to reconsider conventional discourses of assimilation or absorption of differences which undermine diversity.

The conference aims to shed light on issues pertaining to language, culture, and religion, at large from, a pluri-disciplinary and/or multicultural perspective for a better understanding of the multiple, multi-faceted, and highly complex relations between the three pivotal components of the triad, language, culture, and religion.

Focal interest areas include (but are not limited to) tvhe following topics:

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